In this feature, Victor Ayeni reveals that Lekan Ayuba, director of a UK-based social care recruitment agency, took advantage of former employees through dubious promises of care jobs and non-existent sponsorship certificates. He writes about how he is said to have amassed wealth by luring applicants.
In the ‘About Us’ section of UK-based company Click Operations’ website, the company describes itself as ‘a medical recruitment agency that helps recruit and retrain highly trained, caring and dedicated teams. company.” ‘Care workers’ provide care across the UK.
According to the UK home learning website www.nccholearning.co.uk, a care worker is someone who “supports other people in all aspects of their daily lives, including preparing and eating meals, socializing, physical activity and other activities.” trained professionals.” Medical support.
Some care workers work in care homes, while others are employed in patients’ homes on a contract basis. Home caregivers, on the other hand, visit different people’s homes in the community.
Unfortunately, many of the Nigerian applicants who relied on the Head of Click Operations, Lekan Ayuba, to provide them with a Certificate of Sponsorship to enter the UK have failed to make the claim on his agency’s website ‘ “It’s just a window-dressing scheme to lure desperate people.” people. ”
According to the latest Adult Social Care Sector and Workforce Report, 9.9% of UK care industry jobs will be vacant between 2022 and 2023, which is an average of 152,000 job openings per day. This corresponds to
As a result of this talent shortage, many UK employers are resorting to recruiting adult social care workers from other countries such as Nigeria, Zimbabwe and India.
Some of these applicants who are currently stranded in Nigeria told Saturday Punch that they have splurged millions of naira on medical examinations, international driving licenses, police reports and CoS to travel to the UK. Ayuba reportedly continued to postpone the issuance of CoS. .
The applicants also alleged that since parting with the money last year, Ayuba has refused to refund the money and abruptly stopped contacting them.
Travel agent Funmilayo Dan Musa collected applications, documents and health insurance premiums from Ayuba, whose 18-year-old nephew needed to be flown to the UK for treatment. , claimed to have died while being deceptively stretched. .
She further said Ayuba blocked her on her social media accounts along with other primary applicants and left a debt of gratitude to those who recommended him.
After their story was published in Saturday Punch two weeks ago, several former Nigerian employees who had worked with Ayuba in the UK contacted the correspondent to help them get more clients and start their own business. They accused him of using them to accumulate wealth.
However, the former employees did not want their full names published, citing safety reasons.
They accused Ayuba of promising to issue a CoS, refusing to refund money, borrowing money from former staff and arbitrarily firing him from the company when he stopped bringing applicants to the agency. He accused her of extorting money.
“He made money by deceiving people.”
In an interview with Saturday Punch, the former business development manager at Click Operations, known as Joel, said that Ayuba met him in 2022 at a church where he ran a care agency and had many contracts around the world. He said he told her that he was tying the knot. England.
This was later proven to be false, he claimed, after he was hired by the agency and realized that the agency only had customers.
“Ayuba begged me to start a business with him and I agreed. He (Ayuba) often gives instructions on which accounts to send money from applicants. Some of this money was transferred to his account and some was refunded, leaving him with £180,000.
“Most of his dealings with these people were based on lies, so when these people started asking for refunds, he was defrauding them. We have been unable to contact his lawyer. , he was the only contact with the lawyer, so everything he told us was what we relied on as directors of the company.
“It was only much later that we realized he was not who we thought he was. Now he is unreachable. He has blocked us on WhatsApp and He changed his number. He sent someone to tell us that he was a British citizen and that no one could do anything to him if we came to his house. , he threatened to call the police,” Joel said.
Joel’s wife, Ruth, claimed that although Ayuba paid for the recruitment drive and gave some refunds to some of the people he brought in, she still owed him a total of £180,000.
She said, “Lecan signed a document with one of the people who paid him money, stating how much he owed us and how he intended to repay us in full. There’s proof.
“We held a meeting with Lekan where the pastor tried to reach an amicable settlement with us, but in this meeting Ayuba admitted that he had received a total of 180,000 pounds from us and announced that he would be able to do so in 2024. I promised to pay monthly.
“People are dragging us left and right for nominating him and some are crying because of the money he withheld. What we want is for Lekan Ayuba to come forward and refund the money. And stop hiding.”
Also in an interview with Saturday Punch, a former manager of the company who gave his name as Deola said that in 2020 he became friends with Ayuba and through her he took his company to the Healthcare Quality Commission (all health and social care). He said that he had registered it with the government agency that regulates it. Service in the UK.
“Running a home health practice in the UK is CQC regulated and must go through a registration process. You must have a registered manager and a designated individual. He asked me to join his team and I agreed. We registered his business in November 2023,” she revealed.
Mr Deora claimed Mr Ayuba had led him to believe he had signed a contract, but it was the CQC registration that had delayed it.
“He asked me to bring in people to pay for the recruitment process and they gave him the money. All the money I gave him was in cash and he was one of the employees. This was between September 2023 and January 2024. Thousands of pounds were also donated to Mr Lecan by former employees of his organization. The money was received as cash at the direction of the staff.
“All these people who paid money were added to a WhatsApp group and Lekan was the group admin. Then everything got ugly and people asked for refunds and Ayuba said some of these applicants were intermediaries. I continued to tell a different story to the mediator who told me about it.
“Eventually, the middlemen and some others confronted Mr. Ayuba at his home and the police intervened. He lied that they wanted to kidnap him. This led to the arrest of the middlemen, and Ayuba and others accused of masterminding the kidnapping and denied collecting any money from me,” she added.
deceive a desperate person
Theresa Omotayo, a former operations director at Click Operations, said that when she met Ayuba through a colleague, he assured her that he was building a care company, prompting her to quit her previous job and join his team. He said it happened.
She added: “Ayuba has offered me sponsored work and has spoken to me about his contracts in several parts of the UK and his plans to provide training to international candidates whom he intends to sponsor.” Thank you.”
“When I joined, I discovered that his company did not have a number of contracts in place like he had claimed. He did not even have a CQC certification to support carers. did.
“He involved me in training foreign candidates on soft skills and wanted the caregivers to be well trained and have the basics before entering the country, so he didn’t rush the training and ensured that it was appropriate and complete. I didn’t know that he was already charging these candidates and getting more time for training.”
Ms Omotayo also claimed that her visa was not issued for several months and the candidate began asking for a refund, a portion of which was repaid by Mr Ayuba.
“We were still dealing with this issue when he (Ayuba) suddenly deleted us all from the company’s WhatsApp group. He said the company had folded, but in reality the company It didn’t close. He’s still using different people to run the business,” she added.
Burden on staff
Another former employee, Joy Opeoluwa, said she started working for Ayuba and Click Operations at the end of 2022.
“I went on vacation in late January this year and started again in March. At this point I had already paid a month’s salary. I asked Lekan (Ayuba) what was going on. However, he assured me that he would start paying my caregiver and my pending salaries because he claimed he was trying to get more contracts.
“Subsequently, complaint emails to the company, some of which Mr. I learned that he was allegedly collecting money, including his salary.
“Caregivers on shift were suffering because they weren’t paid. I sent Lekan screenshots of their complaints, but he didn’t seem to care and said it was fine. When I challenged him about it, he decided to remove me from the company platform. My company email stopped working, so I had to submit my resignation.” Opeoluwa told Saturday Punch.
She accused Ayuba of still not paying her three months’ salary apart from other allowances.
“I tried to contact him via text message and was told several times that he was working on it. As of now, he has changed his phone number and is not responding to emails. No,” Opeoluwa added.
Also, in an interview with Saturday Punch, a former employee, Dare Olatunji, claimed that neither Ayuba nor his lawyer processed any of the candidates’ visa applications.
Olatunji said, “If the government does not take money from you and all this money is given to you, where is their money?” Why doesn’t Ayuba return the money he took from people? He cannot say that because the company was self-sufficient, it gave money to the government or that the government paid salaries to its employees.
“Employees worked hard to win the company’s customers and the company could boast of sustainability even after their salaries were paid from July 2023. Immediately, after several meetings, he decided to refuse to pay his employees and dissolve the company, leading to his resignation.
These are faceless individuals – Ayuba
Saturday Punch contacted Mr. Ayuba again on Wednesday to respond to the allegations, and he said Click Operations is owned by his brother and that he was on a business trip when he responded to the first publication two weeks ago. He explained that he was unable to do so.
“That company is owned by my brother, not me, and when you sent that email he was going on a business trip and said he would reply to the email when he got back. He was on a business trip when I sent him.
“We were surprised, but he advised me to leave it alone so as not to get involved in extortion. “Have you trained?” he asked.
He told our correspondent to resend him a list of allegations made against him by former employees.
Upon receiving an email summarizing the allegations, he demanded that our correspondent reveal the personal information of those who had accused him.
“Thank you for your email. In my company, it doesn’t matter who they are, so please tell me their names. Please tell me what each of them claims against me,” Ayuba’s email said. .
When a correspondent informed him that former employees had chosen pseudonyms for security reasons, Ayuba described them as “faceless individuals.”
He writes: “These are faceless people. How do we respond to allegations like this? How can we be sure that it’s not just some bad actors maliciously fabricating lies?
“I will not respond to such malicious accusations. You are an investigative journalist and you know what is right to do. Thank you very much.”
Saturday Punch also emailed the Home Office on September 28 regarding the allegations against ClickOps, but had not yet received a response at the time of filing this report.
